Kabbalah: Secrecy, Scandal and the Soul

By Harry Freedman

This book tells the story of the mystical Jewish system known as Kabbalah, from its earliest origins until the present day.

We trace Kabbalah's development, from the second century visionaries who visited the divine realms and brought back tales of their glories and splendours, through the unexpected arrival of a book in Spain that appeared to have lain unconcealed for over a thousand years, and on to the mystical city of Safed where souls could be read and the history of heaven was an open book.

Kabbalah's Christian counterpart, Cabala, emerged during the Renaissance, becoming allied to magic, alchemy and the occult sciences. A Kabbalistic heresy tore apart seventeenth century Jewish communities, while closer to our time Aleister Crowley hijacked it to proclaim 'Do What Thou Wilt'.

Kabbalah became fashionable in the late 1960s in the wake of the hippy counter-culture and with the approach of the new age, and enjoyed its share of fame, scandal and disrepute as the twenty first century approached.

This concise, readable and thoughtful history of Kabbalah tells its story as it has never been told before. It demands no knowledge of Kabbalah, just an interest in asking the questions 'why?' and 'how?'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781472950970

Harry Freedman

Harry Freedman is Britain's leading author of popular works of Jewish culture and history. His publications include The Talmud: A Biography, Kabbalah: Secrecy, Scandal and the Soul, The Murderous History of Bible Translations Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius and Britain's Jews. He has a PhD on an Aramaic translation of the Bible from the University of London. He lives in London with his wife Karen. You can follow his regular articles on harryfreedman.substack.com.

Book preview

KABBALAH

Dedicated to the memory of

Louis Freedman 1921–2017

Joan Freedman 1926–2018

For the winter is past, the rain has gone. The buds have appeared on the earth, the time for song has arrived and the voice of the dove is heard in our land.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

The Origins of Kabbalah

Out of the East

The Beginning of Kabbalah

Radiance

Christian Cabala

The City of Mystics

Cabala and the Occult Sciences

Golem

Good, Evil and the Life of the Soul

Critics and Crisis

Decline and Revival

Hasidism

The Occult Revival

Towards Modernity

The New Age

Appendix: A Very Brief Outline of the Sefirot

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A Note on the Author

Plates

List of Illustrations

Preface

Next time you meet a Hollywood celebrity, take a look at their left wrist. See if they have a knotted red string tied around it. If they do, the chances are they have visited a Kabbalah Centre, where red string can be bought for as little as $26 a length and small bottles of Kabbalah water for only $4 each.

The Kabbalah Centre used to say that their water was subjected to a process that restructured its intermolecular binding. After a BBC documentary challenged their assertion they dropped it from their website. In reality, Kabbalah water doesn’t seem to be any different from the ordinary variety. Yet the claims made for its healing powers are outrageous. It is beneficial to soak one’s feet in it, while meditating on letters from the Hebrew alphabet. It can, apparently, even cure cancer. Madonna, the most prominent of all the Kabbalah Centre’s devotees, planned to fill her swimming pool with it.

Red string bracelets are said to protect against the evil eye. Whatever its power, it didn’t help David Beckham at the Euros in 2004; he wore the string, missed a penalty and England were out of the competition.

Neither red string nor Kabbalah water seems to offer much protection against calumny and scandal, if events surrounding the international network of Kabbalah Centres are anything to go by. Set up in the 1980s by an enterprising former insurance salesman and his wife, the Kabbalah Centre proved astonishingly successful in attracting wealthy celebrities, as well as selling string and water. At the peak of their popularity, which occurred perhaps not coincidentally around the turn of the millennium, their VIP visitors included Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan, Elizabeth Taylor and Sandra Bernhard. Mick Jagger, Princess Eugenie of York, Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears are just some of those seen wearing the red bracelet.

But as the glamour years subsided, fraud and sex scandals began dogging the Centre’s reputation. Its leaders were accused of running a cult. Sandra Bernhard, who had first introduced Madonna to the Kabbalah Centre, summed it up: ‘The wheels started to fall off … Unfortunately, money corrupts everything, even spirituality.’

By its very nature celebrity attention is ephemeral. It was bound to pass. Perhaps for the rock stars and movie icons Kabbalah was nothing more than a passing fad, a whimsy by which public lives could attempt to reconnect with their inner being. But there is nothing faddish about the philosophers, scientists and intellectual giants who have been drawn to Kabbalah. C. G. Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, brought the subject to the attention of post-war Europe’s intelligentsia, maintaining as he did that Kabbalah’s portrayal of the cosmos reflected the structure of the human psyche. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher who claimed to have discovered the principles of mathematical calculus, dabbled in Kabbalah, while his great rival Isaac Newton studied and repudiated it. John Locke, the founder of modern political liberalism, the poet John Milton and maybe even William Shakespeare were familiar with Kabbalah. Today, scientists of a mystical bent point to the astonishing similarity between the fifteenth-century Kabbalistic description of the creation of the universe and the modern theory of the Big Bang.

Critics of Kabbalah – and there have been many – will point to the so-called cranks and social misfits whose Kabbalistic dabblings enabled them to impress, influence and often manipulate their more gullible followers. Aleister Crowley invariably tops this list, followed by Eliphas Lévi and a host of lesser-known occultists, of whom the most interesting is probably the obscure Dr Falcon, known as the Ba’al Shem of London. Centuries earlier, Kabbalah’s weird and wonderful cast list had included Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, immortalised in literature as Dr Faustus, the magician John Dee, Emperor Rudolf II of Prague and, as legend would have it, the golem who terrorised the streets of his city.

History is full of the names of those drawn to the mysteries of Kabbalah, some immersing themselves deeply, others barely scratching the surface. Yet, for the different ages in which they lived, and for the great variety of their lifestyles, they all had one thing in common. They all consumed Kabbalah as if they were plucking from a tree laden with ripe fruit. They barely gave a thought to how its theories were devised, how its cosmology had developed or how its mysteries had been revealed. That Kabbalah was a mysticism immersed in the Jewish tradition, with roots going back two thousand years, meant very little to them They knew nothing of the years of study, the self-abnegation and ascetic rigour which had enabled the classical Jewish kabbalists in Provence, Spain and finally Galilee to perfect their art.

And nor need they have known. For the most part the philosophers, magicians and scientists were drawing not on the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, but on its Christian reformulation, conceived during the Renaissance by men like Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, Christian scholars of the Hebrew mysteries.

Arguably it was the divergence of Christian Cabala from its Jewish progenitor which paved the way for other Kabbalistic strands that emerged through the ages. Again arguably, it is the existence of these diverse strands that make it impossible for anyone today, even the classical kabbalists, to claim that theirs is the sole, legitimate expression of Kabbalah. That at least is the argument of this book.

Kabbalah today is more popular than it has ever been. In its classical Jewish incarnation it is practised and studied by mystically inclined Pietists in inward-looking communities. A world away, those seeking to overcome the stresses and conflicts of modern life take courses, read books and attend lectures on Kabbalah’s contemporary manifestation. These two Kabbalahs speak to wholly different cultures, but they share the same story. It is the story I hope to tell.¹

Introduction

Kabbalah was never meant to be fashionable. Its earliest exponents, deeply mystical, other-worldly Jews, studying in closed, secretive groups in twelfth-century Provence, would have been amazed, probably horrified, to hear how far and wide their doctrine has spread and how universal it has become.

The recent interest in Kabbalah emerged out of the hippy movement’s fascination with mysticism and meditation in the 1960s. It became particularly popular with the advent of New Age spirituality in the late twentieth century, when it was feted as a powerful technique for personal development. This was not Kabbalah as it had been practised in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. But Kabbalah has always evolved, changed and bifurcated into different strands. The twentieth century was by no means the first time that Kabbalah had broken away from its early, exclusively Jewish confines.

Christian Cabala (note the different spelling) was conceived at the high point of the Renaissance, in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florence. As the sixteenth century progressed it became allied to magic, alchemy and Hermeticism. Kabbalah contributed to the scientific revolution and played a central part in the nineteenth-century occult revival. Meanwhile, enigmatic new Kabbalistic practices and beliefs were becoming ever more closely embedded into mainstream Jewish life. Kabbalah is a rare example of a spiritual philosophy open to people of all creeds, yet one that does not detract from their faith. Today it is studied by more people, of all religions and none, than ever before.

The essence of Kabbalah is the quest to understand how the divine will conceived, created and maintains the universe, to use that understanding to draw closer to the unknowable source of all, and ultimately to restore the flawed cosmos to its original perfection. But, of course, it’s far more complicated than that.

This book tells the story of Kabbalah’s origins, its development and spread, from its earliest beginnings until the present day. Exactly when those earliest beginnings were is not so easy to pinpoint.

Our story begins in the first centuries of the Common Era with a group of Jewish mystics whose curiosity about the nature of heaven inspired them to embark on mystical voyages of discovery. We do not know the names of these people, nor where they lived, but we do have some of the literature they left behind. Sunk deep into meditative trances, they constructed elaborate travelogues of their visits to heaven, describing in detail the architecture and layout of the empyrean palaces and halls, cataloguing the dangers waiting to entrap the unwary traveller and extolling the delights awaiting those who deserve them. They knew the names of the angels, categorised them according their various ranks and hierarchies, brought back tales about their complaints and rebellions and learned to sing their songs and adulations. The heaven they described, its awesome majesty and teeming host, appears little different from the court of an ancient oriental potentate. Heaven in their imagination was the idealised paradigm of an earthly seat of power, splendour and glory.

The heavenly voyagers hewed pathways along which the initiate might travel to experience celestial bliss. But for later generations, experiences rhapsodised by enchanted minds were not enough. It was illuminating to know that through the use of meditations, incantations and body contortions one could experience the sublime: that through the use of such techniques one might attain mystical communion with God and his angels. But utopian delight is not intellectually satisfying. Human curiosity demands more.

The intellectual component arrived, in the form of a book that set out in complex and impenetrable detail the numinous tools and techniques used by the Almighty to create the world. Written in Hebrew, the Book of Formation is a strange, terse, almost haunting work, impossible to understand when read literally. It created a mystical vocabulary for the first time, and a quasi- scientific, interconnected way of understanding how, in the eyes of its unknown author, the cosmos was formed. It was all to do with language, and numbers.

The Book of Formation’s laconic hints were developed and expanded by different schools of mystics, philosophers and putative scientists over the succeeding centuries. By the time the threads were drawn together in twelfth-century Provence, the principles of Kabbalah were established.

One only has to read the first chapter of Genesis to know that God commanded the world into being. ‘Let there be light’ is the first thing he said, and sure enough ‘There was light’.¹ The world was created through God’s speech. Hebrew speech, for that is the language of the book of Genesis. Speech is composed of words, and words are made from letters. Letters, specifically Hebrew letters, are therefore the basic tools of creation. The discovery that the alphabet is the foundation of the material world was as important to mystics at the end of the first millennium as was the discovery of DNA’s centrality to life for scientists a thousand years later.

Letters are the building blocks of the cosmos. And, like all building blocks, letters can be arranged, jumbled up and rearranged. When they are arranged in a certain order they appear as the text of the Bible. Within this text, the mysteries of the world’s creation are all encoded. By manipulating and rearranging the letters of Scripture, Kabbalah aims to decode and make clear the divine mysteries.

By the end of the tenth century or thereabouts, the Jewish mystical tradition had discovered how to travel to heaven, the means of communication with the angels and the principles of decoding the Bible to reveal the secrets of the greatest of all powers, the power to create worlds. The focus of Kabbalah now became putting this knowledge together into a coherent, if mystically fuzzy, system. And then to learn how to make use of this knowledge to draw down heavenly bounty that bestows benefit upon individuals, humankind and the world.

Armed with this knowledge, Kabbalah no longer needed to simply gaze at the heavens. Understanding how the cosmos was created brings with it the ability to manipulate creation, to transfigure the physical world. Even before the first kabbalists had finished setting out their doctrine, some of those who possessed mystical knowledge discovered how to use it to change the natural order of things. Far more successful than the magicians of old, the things they could now do were amazing. They outwitted demons, annulled spells, procured wealth, induced fertility and cured illnesses. Kabbalah is not magic. It is much more powerful than that. Ever since Kabbalah was discovered, magic has always ridden in its slipstream.

The word Kabbalah means reception, in the sense of a received tradition. This tradition, according to the kabbalists, was handed down through the generations by word of mouth, beginning with Moses, who received it directly from God. It was eventually set down in writing, according to these same kabbalists, by a second-century rabbi in the Land of Israel. His name was Shimon bar Yoḥai. A member of the fraternity who laid the foundations for modern Judaism, he is quoted frequently in the early rabbinic literature. However, there is no mention in this literature of the book he is supposed to have written, in which he explicated Moses’s oral tradition. This book was lost, or deliberately concealed, for over a thousand years. It eventually surfaced in the thirteenth century, bearing the name Zohar, in the Castile region of Spain.

The mystery of what happened to the Zohar during its years of concealment is, to historians and rationalists, no mystery at all. They believe it only ‘appeared’ in the thirteenth century, because that is when it was written. They believe it was attributed to Shimon bar Yoḥai by its medieval authors, in order to provide it with a venerable prestige.

Of all the many Kabbalistic books, the Zohar is by far the most important. The questions of who wrote it, where it came from and whether it really is the product of an ancient revealed tradition are all secondary to the impact that the book has had on the development of Kabbalah.

The Zohar is a gigantic tome that meanders between stories, parables, metaphors, mystical allusions and metaphysical speculation. It is a compelling, if lengthy, book to read. Yet beneath the captivating romance of its narrative lie the mystical outlines of Kabbalah, ideas which were elaborated upon and systematised by devotees over succeeding decades. As time went by Kabbalah became more intricate, its concepts more abstruse, its terminology more complex, its allusions more daring.

The world of the Zohar and its kabbalists was small and secluded. It stayed that way for over 200 years. Then, in the space of just five years, two unconnected events took place, after which Kabbalah could never be the same again. In 1492, the closed world of the kabbalists was ruptured when the Jews were expelled from Spain together with their Kabbalah. Around the same time, in Renaissance Florence, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola extracted Kabbalah from its Jewish context, proclaiming it a universal science whose true importance was not to Judaism but to Christianity. Pico’s scholarship marked the beginning of Christian Cabala.

From that moment, Kabbalah dwelt in two distinct, disconnected worlds. In Christian Europe it became the source of arcane hints designed to support the principles of Christianity. Later, Christian Cabala was utilised to buttress new, emerging systems of thought. As a putative natural science it contributed to Enlightenment philosophy, its occult nature underpinned the dissident beliefs of nineteenth-century supernaturalists and as a tool for self-development it fuelled much of the esotericism of the twenty-first-century New Age.

Christian Cabala influenced the scientific outlook of men like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton, albeit negatively in the latter case. Its symbols and motifs found their way into the literature of Spenser, Marlowe and perhaps even Shakespeare.² The angelic ranks and demonic hierarchies of Milton’s Paradise Lost are drawn directly from its mythology; John Locke investigated it when formulating his political philosophy. Most spectacularly, Christian Cabala became allied with magic, Hermeticism, alchemy and lesser arts within the occult galaxy, to inspire devout, misunderstood magicians like Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee. Controversially, Kabbalah and the concealed arts strode side by side into the twentieth century, at the heels of the infamous Aleister Crowley.

While Christian Cabala was forging new paths, Jewish mystical fraternities in the northern Israel city of Safed were pushing at classical Kabbalah’s boundaries, seeking a theology to explain their nation’s traumatic exile. Scarred by the Spanish expulsion yet with their cultural horizons expanded through sojourns in Turkey, North Africa and the European Mediterranean, the Safed kabbalists embarked on a reappraisal of their mystical doctrine. Their work reached its peak in the thought of Isaac Luria, who saw earthly exile as merely a consequence of a far greater dislocation that had taken place in the divine realms above. This dislocation, the drama of heavenly exile in Luria’s theory, was a necessary act, essential for the creation of the world. Isaac Luria became as important to the future of Jewish Kabbalah as Pico della Mirandola had been to its Christian offspring. Significantly, or not, both men died at a very young age.

The approach of modernity did nothing to lessen Kabbalah’s appeal to the dreams and fantasies of the masses, or to diminish its disruptive potential. A messianic crisis rooted in Kabbalah rocked the Jewish world in the seventeenth century. Its repercussions could be felt across Europe; they still reverberate today. A hundred years later Kabbalah was instrumental in creating Hasidism, the most vibrant, yet anti-modern of all Jewish religious movements.

Kabbalah became fashionable in the late twentieth century. The Kabbalah Centre, famous in its heyday for its celebrity devotees, formulated Kabbalistic responses and techniques to address the aspirations, stresses and traumas of modern life. Buffeted by accusations of cultism, sexual offences and financial misdemeanours, its short history has been rocky. It has won praise and criticism in roughly equal measure; as has all Kabbalah throughout its history.

Today, Kabbalah exists in many incarnations, and is taught from many perspectives. Its story is far from over. I have tried in this book to provide a flavour of its history so far.

A vast amount has been written on the Kabbalah. There are many guides aimed at lay people, the best of which offer an accessible introduction to the principles and theory of Kabbalah. Yet the great majority of the literature is highly specialised and technical, inaccessible to a general readership, frequently mystifying even to those who have immersed themselves in the subject for years.

A critical approach to Kabbalah is taken by the academic community. Scholarly researchers come at the subject from many different angles. Some look at how particular ideas developed by examining their historical setting or external influences. Others explore the social structure of Kabbalistic communities, and the environments in which they flourished. Still others seek to identify previously unknown mystical circles, investigate the literary structure of Kabbalist texts or review how Kabbalah has influenced the life and thought of those beyond its borders.

I have taken a slightly different approach. Rather than being a book about what Kabbalah is or how different variants and theories emerged, I have chosen to discuss what happened to Kabbalah, looking at milestones in Kabbalah’s history and its key interactions with the external world. I have written it for anyone who thinks that the history of Kabbalah might be interesting, interesting enough at least to spend a few hours reading about it. It is an unusual history, and one well worth pondering.

Although the academic study of Kabbalah is as much a part of its history as everything else, I have not devoted a separate chapter to the subject’s many scholars. This book is based, in large measure, on the research, theories and conclusions of the academic community, as referenced in the footnotes and bibliography. I hope that conveying their insights to the best of my ability is the most appropriate way of expressing their contribution to Kabbalah’s history. I have frequently had to choose between competing academic theories, but I trust that for the most part I have remained close to whatever consensus may be said to prevail among the scholarly community. All errors and infelicities in the text are, of course, mine.

Kabbalah’s popularity today was never a foregone conclusion. It has always had opponents who ridiculed and vilified it. Even today there are many who look with suspicion upon what they term pop-Kabbalah or Kabbalah-lite, who mock the mystically absorbed, closed world of the devout religious kabbalists, or who scorn the whole subject as superstition. Such views might indeed be correct: it is not the purpose of this book to persuade you otherwise. Like all religious beliefs, Kabbalah may be irrational; it is certainly not an empirically validated science. But the bigger point surely isn’t whether or not Kabbalah is superstition, but whether it works for those who practise it. Provided, of course, it is not used to exploit the vulnerable or to justify unethical practices, a charge which has been levelled against some practitioners of the art in recent times.

Kabbalah today is practised on many levels. There are those for whom it is a real, everyday part of their highly devout lives. There are others who live contemporary lifestyles, yet at times of crisis or moments of life-changing significance may go to one of these devout kabbalists for an amulet or a blessing. Many people who read and study Kabbalah regard it as a tool that helps them to successfully navigate life in the twenty-first century. Kabbalah in the contemporary world can be approached in so many different ways that nobody, even the most conventional of classical kabbalists, can claim their perspective is the real thing, that they have sole rights to Kabbalah’s genuine expression. As this book tries to make clear, there have been so many different incarnations of Kabbalah, existing side by side for so long, that it is meaningless to speak of authenticity.

Even before I began to write this book it was clear that the field of Kabbalah is so wide, and that its history has included so many personalities of note, that it would not be possible to include everything and everyone within the overview I was planning. As a result, many significant kabbalists do not get a mention at all; others only receive a few words. Of course, every thinker makes their mark. But unless that mark has moved the story of Kabbalah forward in some significant way, the chances are that, for reasons of space and readability, I have not been able to include them. If your favourite Kabbalist does not receive a mention in the text I can only apologise. Even deeply profound insights, however uniquely expressed, do not always result in significant historical development.

One of the problems when writing about a subject heavily rooted in a foreign language, as Kabbalah is in Hebrew, is how to deal with the technical jargon. I have tried wherever possible to use English equivalents for Hebrew concepts, names and even book titles. But, remarkably, some ideas are more intelligible when expressed in their original Hebrew than in an English translation. The sefirot – a fundamental principle of Kabbalistic theory – are a good example. There is no English word which even comes close to providing an adequate translation. So I have included a glossary for easy reference when a translation has appeared to be inadequate.

Using words in their original language gives rise to the problem of transliteration, how to deal with letters in the original language that have no equivalent in the target tongue. There are two letters in Hebrew which sound like the ‘ch’ in the Scottish word loch. One is softer than the other and neither is satisfactorily rendered by the letters ‘ch’, usually pronounced as in cheese. I have chosen to follow a convention that renders the harder pronunciation by ‘ch’ and the softer by ‘ḥ’, i.e. with a dot under the ‘h’. Unless, that is, the word is commonly used in English, in which case I have followed the usual spelling. For example, Hasid and not Ḥasid.

All Kabbalistic systems are complex and I have not discussed them in any greater detail than is necessary to get across the historic points. Nevertheless, there are times when it has been necessary to refer to basic Kabbalistic ideas, otherwise the topic might make no sense at all. I have therefore included a very short appendix outlining the key principles of the theory of the sefirot, the most fundamental of all Kabbalistic principles. This is not designed to replace any of the excellent guides to Kabbalah that already exist – it is far too short and incomplete. But it may be of some use in understanding some of the discussions in the book.

The Origins of Kabbalah

‘DO NOT CRY WATER, WATER’

A story is told of four men who entered the Pardes. Nobody knows for sure what the Pardes was, but the word in Persian means a garden. The story, however, is not about a visit to a garden; it is an account of a mystical journey to the heavenly spheres. The word Pardes is the origin of our word